CPU effect on RAW conversion performance

[rpstewart]

There are plenty of subjective reviews out there comparing the output of different RAW converters - colour accuracy, sharpness etc.

What I'm wondering is - has someone done a comparative test using different CPUs? Given that I can spend a fair while sat in front of the PC post processing and a lot of that is time spent waiting for previews & final processing in RSE.

Now any upgrade to the PC is unfortunately going to be CPU, board, RAM, Graphics etc etc etc so I'm looking for some hard evidence of an improvement before I start looking at costs.

 

[rpstewart]

^Got it in one^

I reckon any processor upgrade is going to cost about £1k by the time I add in new RAM, new GPU cos I'll end up going PCI-e etc etc etc

I'm already running a P4 3.06Ghz (533MHz FSB) with 1.5Gb of RAM so the current box is no slouch. Thinking about a 4400+ X2 or the like with 2-3Gb of RAM but I'm not sure what the improvement's going to be. RSE is fully multithreaded so it'll use a dual core CPU so I think I might get approximately a speed doubling by the time you factor in the increased memory bandwidth.

Does anyone have a similar spec that they could do a test RAW conversion on?

 

[rpstewart]

What kind of tests would you like to see ?

The output doesn't bother me, I'm more interested in an idea of how long a RAW conversion would take on the likes of an AMD X2.

 

[rpstewart]

4 Seconds on AMD 4400+ X2 64Bit. 2 Gig RAM

8Mp RAW in 4 seconds! Which RAW converter is that with?

Froam what I understand a dual core processor, as yet, wont be quicker than a single core clocked the same. This is because photo editing progrmas arnt yet scripted for dual cores I dont think.

Photoshop has been fully multithreaded for several versions and RAW Shooter has been since the official release.

 

[rpstewart]

RAW Shooter Premium 2006

Cool, thanks for that. Looks like it could be a very worthwhile upgrade then.

Time to do some sums.....